When the government of Stephen Harper shut down seven of Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO)’s nine research libraries in 2013, it came as a bit of a shock. But rather than digitizing the content, as promised, for approximately 80% of the material, primarily one-off unique research material sources, were destroyed. Landfills, dumpsters, and even old-fashioned book burnings of scientific material, all led by the Harper government’s mandate, a mandate driven by the ideology fed to the Prime Minister from the nameless oligarchs who have given him millions.

One DFO scientist, who asked for his name not to be given, had this to say to The Tyee:

The Department has claimed that all useful information from the closed libraries is available in digital form. This is simply not true. Much of the material is lost forever.

A full war on science and reason appears to be underway in Canada, with the Harper government and their corporate masters against the people themselves. The libraries have been shuttered for over a year, and the promised digitizing never materialized. Archive access has been cut off, and the scientists fired. Science is now up for the highest bidder, and any information which runs contrary to Harper’s corporate overlords is to be suppressed. After all, it is not as if his Conservative party even has a majority vote, only gaining just shy of 40% of the vote, yet being handed 54% of the seats in Parliament, demonstrating that vote manipulation is still a major problem even north of the border. Even more telling is how members of his party were found guilty of engaging in vote fraud as part of the ‘Robogate” scandal.

By the time the next Canadian Parliament is elected, the damage to the nation’s scientific excellence will be irreversible. Indeed, it may already be too late to save the valuable, and impossible to replace the hundreds of thousands of documents, journals and books destroyed by the Harper government. A true shame for a nation which once was held in such regards in the fields of science and learning.